Snook.ca

Top of Page

Top of Page links are quite common on a number of sites. In fact, most of the government sites that I do mandate that the link appear at the bottom of the page. I've seen some developers include it every few paragraphs. I've just assumed, "Yeah, that's a good idea" and then I actually stopped to think about it. The conclusion I came to was to NOT use them and I have a couple reasons why.

Why duplicate functionality that the browser already offers? Any browser that I tested supported a quick and easy method for getting back to the top of the page.

It could make things more confusing for screen readers. I had the opportunity to participate in accessibility testing of a web site and this particular blind person often pulled up a list of links on the page and picked one from the list based on what he just read. It'd add clutter to have to go through a bunch of Top of Page links to get to the link he wanted. (an aside: always ensure that the text you've linked makes sense when not in the context of the paragraph).